"Sparse and geometric contour": transformations of the body in H.D.'s 'Nights' - Hilda Doolittle - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2001 by Miranda B. Hickman

"Courage to cut two straight lines":

Geometry in Nights

Throughout Nights, H.D. repeatedly deploys geometric images to unfold the narrative of Natalia Saunderson's struggle. Geometric images, in fact, are crucial to the expression of Natalia's desire and the erotic experiences through which she attains visionary consciousness. Again, Natalia's wish to be "embodied" in "square and cube and rectangle" occurs in a novella that focuses on her body and her erotic experiments. Natalia is a writer longing for her absent husband Neil, who has left to engage in amorous adventures with a group of young male friends. The action of Nights consists mainly of Natalia's sexual encounters with David, her new young lover, whose solid masculinity and sexual prowess, she hopes, will alleviate her grief.

As the novella opens, we learn from the narrator of a prologue--John Helforth--of Natalia's eventual suicide. John Helforth is in fact the pseudonym, one of many H.D. used throughout her career, under which she originally distributed Nights. The narrative that follows the prologue, Natalia's narrative, is thus positioned so as to account for Natalia's decision to kill herself, though ultimately it provides only an ambiguous explanation. In introducing Natalia, the prologue establishes the geometric language of the text by having Helforth associate Natalia's desires with geometrical figures. Helforth, we learn, is a friend of Natalia's sister-in-law Renne, who has asked him to write the prologue. His frame not only provides information about the enigmatic Natalia but also prepares in many other ways for Natalia's entrance--piques readerly interest in her, invites questions about the rightfulness and sanity of her conduct, and enables readers to understand her lexicon of images.

Through Helforth, we initially learn that geometric images represent Natalia's quest for visionary states of experience. Helforth describes Natalia's suicide in geometric terms: she had skated out on to the thin ice of a lake, etching two parallel lines that "met in a dark gash of the luminous ice surface" (4-5).This opening geometric image recurs insistently throughout the prologue: Helforth says later, "She drove two straight lines to infinity and she got her answer" (6). By calling her death an "answer' Helforth implies that Natalia's suicide, far from derailing her previous efforts, in fact culminated the persistent search with which he associates her--a Promethean quest for truth and severe beauty, "blatant lightning-realism" (26) in her art, and the utmost intensity of visionary perception in her life. Natalia pursued this effort to "have the peak or nothing" (7), Helforth says, through both her "fervid" writing and "erotic experiments" (4). And thus the geometric image of the parallel lines comes to si gnify not only Natalia's death but also her seeking extreme and visionary states of consciousness.

While Helforth is a sensible, rational figure who would seem likely to condemn Natalia--to read her quest as leading only to artistic failure and destruction--he cannot bring himself to do so altogether. As he notes, while Natalia's chauffeur would simply deem her mad, he cannot be so "brutal" (20). Even as he says, "I never really took her seriously" (15--16), he concedes that she had "a gift, an unquestionable talent" (21), and that in her phrases he finds "an indescribable perfection" (21). He admires the way she completed her quest and got her "answer" (7) as he and others, like Renne, cannot: "Only Natalia had the courage to cut two straight lines, on a fiat surface of an Alpine lake, running to infinity" (10). Given Helforth's decidedly ambivalent pronouncements, readers are impelled to judge for themselves the worth of Natalia's adventures--erotic, aesthetic, and mystical. And thanks to Helforth, as we do so, we are sensitized to the geometric shorthand with which Natalia inscribes the contours of her desire.